We are Making Quest Diagnostics Our National Preferred Provider of Laboratory Services

In an effort to proactively manage health care costs, while continuing to offer excellent access to lab services, Aetna is making a change in the national lab network contract. We have negotiated more competitive lab costs while ensuring your employees' access to services is maintained, as part of a new agreement with Quest Diagnostics. Quest is the nation’s leading provider of diagnostic testing, information and services.

Quest will be our preferred provider of laboratory services for all products, effective July 1, 2007. We also will continue to contract with local, hospital and specialty laboratories, augmenting the extensive Quest network for the convenience of our members and their doctors. This change will also mean LabCorp will no longer be a network provider, effective July 1, 2007.

Agreement Provides Cost-Effective Services, Extensive Access

As Aetna ’s preferred provider, Quest will offer an improved laboratory cost structure to our members and their physicians. Its network is well positioned to serve our members’ needs:

• Size. Quest offers an extensive nationwide network of testing sites, with more than 2,000 patient service centers, approximately 150 rapid response laboratories, 30-plus regional laboratories and esoteric (specialized) testing laboratories on both coasts.
  
  
• Physician Use. The majority of our participating primary care physicians already have selected Quest to provide laboratory testing services for their Aetna patients. We are reaching out to the rest so they can make arrangements that best meet the needs of their patients who are Aetna members.
  
  
• Convenient Sites. We have done a careful analysis of sites where our members use LabCorp facilities today; 97.5 percent of these sites have at least two Quest or local participating facilities within 5 miles of the LabCorp site. This means the change can be made with very little disruption.
  
  
• Network Growth. We and Quest have identified markets that would benefit from additional sites. We will contract with additional local laboratories in these markets as needed.

We are finalizing details of our member communications approach and can update you shortly. We will update our online directory, DocFind, so members can readily access information about participating laboratories.

We also are communicating with physicians about this change, so they are prepared to follow our policies and refer members to contracted laboratories.

We believe this agreement will benefit you and your Aetna plan members by providing ready access to cost-effective laboratory services. If you have questions about this agreement, please give me a call.

Take care.

Mary Fedor
Senior Account Manager
602-427-2249
Fax 860-262-7534